MOBILIZE OUR MAN POWER
December 1, 1917
It has been announced from Washington that, in view of the shortage of labor on the farms, there will be an effort in Congress to permit the importation for temporary use on the farms of Chinese coolies. I do not believe the effort will be successful, and if it were successful it would be one of the greatest calamities that could befall the American people.
Never under any condition should this Nation look at an immigrant as primarily a labor unit. He should always be looked at primarily as a future citizen and the father of other citizens who are tolive in this land as fellows with our children and our children’s children. Our immigration laws, permanent or temporary, should always be constructed with this fact in view. No temporary advantages from the importation of Chinese coolies would offset the far-reaching ultimate damage it would cause.
Neither ought we to approve the plan, sometimes set forth by zealous and high-minded men, to get the Government to open up vast tracts of land and farm it with wage labor. This is a proposal to substitute a wage-earning agricultural proletariat for a farming population which owns the land it tills. It is a move in exactly the wrong direction. We ought by law to do everything possible to put a stop to the growth of an absentee landlord class and of huge estates worked by tenant farmers. Methods identical with or similar to those advocated by me, in my recent book, “The Foes of Our Own Household,” point the way to the proper permanent solution of the question.
As a war measure, rather than adopt either of the proposals above enumerated, let us deal boldly with the situation created by the existence of such vast numbers of men in good physical condition, who are not being utilized. The best war asset and labor asset in this country is the mass of young men from eighteen to twenty-one. This draft law explicitly and unjustifiably excepts this class, although in the Civil War most of the soldiers entered the army when they were under twenty-one. Let us proclaim as our policy that while this war lasts no man shallbe excused from doing the full duty which the Nation finds it necessary to demand from him. Make all the young men from eighteen to twenty-one immediately liable to service, permit no exceptions for any men, no matter how wealthy, who are not already in the army. Use as many of the men thus taken as are necessary to fill the camps when the present drafted men of the national army leave them. Use all the others, and use these men, too, until the camps are ready for them, as labor which the Nation shall mobilize for farm work or any other work which it is imperative to do, and mobilize all the alien labor now in the country in similar fashion.